In German universities there is a tradition of honouring a beloved professor. This is done by compiling letters and articles by students who have carried on correspondence with him over the years. These contributions are edited, bound in a book and presented to him. This compilation, called Festschrift, is an expression of deep appreciation for the teacher. "Like a large immovable rock: Letters from disciples of a modern sage" is a book of accounts written by friends of Advaita sage Ramesh Balsekar, narrating how their lives have been influenced by his Teaching. In its pages you will find the words of several men and women for whom awakening has occurred. For a few other disciples the search has ended, but the fruit is not yet ready to fall. Ramesh has said that awakening means the permanent and complete annihilation of the sense of doership. (By doership what he means is the sense of identity, the egoic structure, the conceptual framework and attendant memories of the self.) And for yet others, the meeting with Ramesh brought recognition that he was the guru they had been seeking. As Ramesh points out, Advaita Vedanta deals with the final impediment - the illusory self, the very one seeking enlightenment.

Colin Mallard played in bomb craters and bombed out buildings as a child in England during the Second World War. Perhaps this was the origin of his interest in peace. He attended University in Boston between 1961-1971 and was deeply involved in the Civil Rights and Anti War Movements. Trained for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, he attended the same seminary as Martin Luther King and later served in both a rural and inner city parish. His church was firebombed and destroyed because of his and the congregation's stand on Civil Rights and its opposition to the Vietnam War. It was his interest in exploring spiritual matters that took him into the ministry and later took him out of it. For the next 25 years he worked as a psychologist. This included working in Hawaii with families of abused children. He has also had different jobs such as magician's assistant, mountain guide, taxi driver, tree planter and street counsellor on Vancouver's skid row. Behind the things he did was a consuming interest in the nature of peace and who or what we are as human beings. This led him to a lengthy study of Taoism, and Zen and, latterly, the Advaita Masters, Ramesh Balsekar and Dr. Jean Klein. Mallard lived on Vancouver Island, where he wrote and taught about the wisdom and insight found in Eastern Philosophy. He was also an avid soccer player and photographer.

Dr Colin Mallard's profile page